you're talking about foreign policy. we think of lincoln as the great emancipator and in the context of civil rights. simply put, what is the foreign policy president lincoln had? >> we think of the civil war as a domestic conflict but it was also a global conflict and lincoln had to deal with a series of crises over the course of his presidency from france, from britain, from spain, even russian ships showed up off the atlantic coast in the middle of the war. any one of these crises could have changed the course of the war if handled badly, could have changed the course of american history i don't think it's too much to say. >> sreenivasan: so it's one success that he kept europe out of our own fight. how do we know he was thinking about slavefully a global context? >> well, lincoln viewed the emancipation proclamation partly as an effort to speak across the atlantic ocean to ordinary europeans. one thing that's interesting to me is that the 19th century, the mid-19th century-- like our own age-- was also an information